Lupus, lymphoma – or murder? Why Jane Austen's mysterious cause of death has puzzled historians for years

Most of the ‘cure-alls’ on sale at the time were entirely without benefit. For example, London’s Old Operating Theatre museum owns a domestic medicine chest from that period, which contains a bottle of Steers’s Chemical Opodeldoc, a popular liniment.

An eye-opening 1783 advert for Opodeldoc lists the many things it can cure – everything from tendon injuries (“In wounded Tendons it is likewise of the greatest Service, by Preventing the Juice which oozes out of them from fixing) to injured horses that are “strained in the back Sinews… or have their Backs galled”. Not bad for an ointment that was, according to a recipe in 1856 text The Medical Formulary, just a mixture of soap, alcohol, camphor and ammonia.

What was Jane Austen’s cause of death?

Against this backdrop of confusion about the nature of illnesses and how to cure them, it should come as no great shock to discover that Jane Austen’s official cause of death was never clearly documented.

Instead, her family and attending physician – the esteemed Dr Giles King Lyford, a surgeon at the county hospital at Winchester – recorded that she died of a vague illness referred to as "consumption" or "decline." No post-mortem was ever performed.

Jane Austen's letters describe how she was plagued by awful ill health in the final years of her life, which left her bedridden at her home in the village of Chawton, near Alton in Hampshire.

In May 1817 she wrote a letter to her friend Anne Sharp, detailing a recent “attack”, explaining: “My chief [sic] sufferings were from feverish nights, weakness & Languor. This Discharge was on me for above a week, & as our Alton Apothy [Apothecary] did not pretend to be able to cope with it, better advice was called in. Our nearest very good, is at Winchester, where there is a Hospital & capital Surgeons, & one of them attended me, & his applications gradually removed the Evil.”

Jane travelled to Winchester to place herself in the care of Lyford two days later, but she never returned home. She died on 18 July 1817 with her devoted sister, Cassandra, by her side.

Was Jane Austen murdered?

Whenever there’s a significant gap in any important historical record, theories – both rational and not-so-rational – will inevitably spring up, and Jane’s death is no different.

One of the most outlandish ideas to be put forward in recent years is that Jane was murdered.

In 2011, crime novelist Lindsay Ashford seized on the fact that traces of arsenic had been found in the Pride and Prejudice author’s body, and concluded that she must have been poisoned.

According to the Guardian, while reading Jane’s letters, the crime novelist spotted the following sentence, written shortly before her death: "I am considerably better now and am recovering my looks a little, which have been bad enough, black and white and every wrong colour."

Ashford realised the symptoms could be ascribed to arsenic poisoning, which can cause "raindrop" pigmentation, where patches of skin go brown or black. After discovering that a lock of Jane’s hair had tested positive for the substance, she said: "I don't think murder is out of the question," she said, adding: “In the early 19th century a lot of people were getting away with murder with arsenic as a weapon.”

However, Ashford’s claims were dismissed by Professor Janet Todd, who edited the Cambridge edition of the works of Jane Austen, who noted that many 19th century ‘cure-alls’ contained arsenic, including remedies that claimed to treat rheumatism, which Jane could have taken.

If not murder, how did Jane Austen die?

Another illness that may have caused Jane’s symptoms is Addison’s Disease, first proposed by English physician and author Zachary Cope in 1964. This rare condition involving adrenal insufficiency, causes fatigue, weakness, weight loss, and white and dark patches on the skin.

This diagnosis has fallen out of favour over the years. One key issue with it is that tubercular Addison’s is often rapidly fatal, yet Jane was ill for about a year before her death in 1817.

A third plausible candidate for Jane’s cause of death is Hodgkin’s disease, a form of lymphoma. Journalist Claire Tomalin took issue with Cope’s diagnosis in her 1997 book Jane Austen: A Life, proposing Hodgkin’s instead, a conclusion also reached by Annette Upfal, professor of British literature at the University of Queensland, in a 2005 Medical Humanities article.

In her letters, Jane described experiencing periodic fevers, a hallmark of Hodgkin lymphoma. Hodgkin’s is also a slowly progressive condition, which matches Jane’s year-long decline. Her fevers also seemed to come and go in cycles, a distinctive characteristic of the illness.

An even more recently proposed theory is that Jane may have died of systemic lupus erythematosus. This chronic autoimmune disease affects multiple organs, causing fatigue, joint pain, skin issues, and organ damage – and also causes recurrent fevers – all symptoms that align with descriptions of her illness. The theory was put forward in 2022 by retired surgeon Michael Sanders following a comprehensive review of all of Jane’s surviving letters.

Did the burned letters hold the secret to Jane Austen’s death?

Were more symptoms described in any of the thousands of letters burned by Cassandra? It seems very likely; and just a few additional details could have helped historians to solve this medical conundrum conclusively.

Of the approximately 3,000 letters Jane Austen is thought to have written, only about 160 remain, many heavily edited by Cassandra or others.

However, it’s likely that she only had the best of intentions in doing so – a desire to protect and preserve Jane’s public image. Jane’s characters showcase the author’s stinging wit and ability to come up with incredible takedowns and scathing retorts. Her letters may well have contained critical or unflattering comments about family members or influential people of their time.

It’s also worth noting that Jane was a private individual and may not have wanted her correspondence to be preserved. Nor might Cassandra have foreseen the letters’ historical value. Few people at the time could have predicted that we’d be still talking about Jane today, or that Cassandra’s actions would form the basis for a BBC drama more than 200 years on.